


St. Patrick's Day

by SharkAria



Series: Holiday SanSan [2]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, F/M, saint patrick's day
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-13
Updated: 2016-03-13
Packaged: 2018-05-26 13:44:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6241588
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SharkAria/pseuds/SharkAria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Just run to the shop on the corner,</i> Ygritte had said, her green lipstick shimmering under the blacklight as she had grinned drunkenly.  <i>It’ll only take a minute,</i> Alayaya had agreed, batting her plastic emerald eyelashes at Sansa.  Maybe the girls would have been right if it had been a regular Thursday night, but on St. Patrick’s Day at the liquor store, the selection of booze was limited and the line was long.</p>
            </blockquote>





	St. Patrick's Day

**Author's Note:**

> Because some holiday fics need a sequel. And crazy outfits.

_Just run to the shop on the corner,_ Ygritte had said, her green lipstick shimmering under the blacklight as she had grinned drunkenly. _It’ll only take a minute,_ Alayaya had agreed, batting her plastic emerald eyelashes at Sansa. Maybe the girls would have been right if it had been a regular Thursday night, but on St. Patrick’s Day at the liquor store, the selection of booze was limited and the line was long. Sansa hadn’t been thinking about that when she had agreed to make the beer run, though. She had been thinking that there was no way she was going to guzzle Bailey’s and Jameson’s all night long. Beer was the only logical solution to her friends’ party’s alcohol selection problem. 

Nevertheless, she had taken a couple shots before she had popped out. In retrospect, she probably should have left her sparkly shamrock sunglasses at the party, because between the cruddy fluorescent lights overhead, the booze in her stomach, and the cheap green lenses covering half her face, she could barely see anything in front of her. 

Sansa rolled her shoulders, trying to ease the ache in her arms from the two heavy cases of Guinness she was holding. She wanted to put the boxes and the package of green food coloring down on the floor until it was her turn to pay, but with the number of drunk customers staggering through the place, she was afraid that someone would try to gank them when she wasn’t looking.

Unfortunately, the movement caused Sansa’s novelty glasses to slide down the bridge of her nose, and they threatened to fall right onto the grimy linoleum tiles. She raised up her knee to support the the cases of beer with just one hand, then tried to push the glasses up onto her forehead so that she could actually see. Instead, the stupid things got all caught up in the light-up headband she was wearing. The green and gold plastic beads on her wrist clacked together and snarled in her hair. The package of food coloring slid off the top box and fell to the floor, and when she scrambled to grab it, the hair-entangled bracelets threatened to rip a big lock straight out of her scalp. “Ow!” She squealed, and she froze to halt further deterioration of her situation.

“Need help?” A familiar throaty voice rasped out in front of her, and Sansa looked up at the customer. He gazed down at her, shock splashed across his face.

She’d only met Sandor the one time on Halloween, but she had thought about him many times in the months since. At Christmas, she had wistfully longed for his kisses when she’d watched Robb brush his lips against his very pregnant wife’s forehead as the couple stood under a sprig of mistletoe. On New Year’s Eve, she had thought of Sandor’s scarred face when her tipsy date had planted a wet and totally uninspiring smooch on her cheek at midnight. On Valentine’s Day, she had imagined his crooked smile when she had babysat her newborn niece so that Robb and Jeyne could have their very first postpartum night out on the town. And right at this moment, she was remembering the feeling of his lips on hers, as he stood before her with with his uneven mouth hanging open and his good eyebrow arched in surprise. 

Of course she would finally have to run into Sandor tonight, while she was dressed like a walking advertisement for the seasonal costume shop where she worked.

Just as Sansa was opening her mouth to ask what on earth he was doing here, she dropped the beer. Never had the sound of breaking glass and fizzing liquid seemed so mortifying.

“Hey-o!” yowled the frat boy in line behind her, who leapt out of the way of the fast expanding puddle. “Watch it, red!”

Sansa hunched her shoulders as her face burned. Her cheeks were probably as pink as a leprechaun’s. “Sorry,” she said to Sandor, who shrugged as a turkey-necked young man sauntered up through the vodka aisle with a ratty mop and a bucket filled with murky water. 

“Well, that would happen on my shift,” he lamented. His crooked nametag indicated that he was _Edd, pleased to serve YOU_. “People always drop their liquor on my shift. Oh well. If no one spilled anything, the floor would never get mopped,” he complained dolefully. He sloshed the water onto the floor, and Sansa stepped out of the way and up to the register, her arms empty.

“Hey girlie, you’ll be paying for the broken bottles,” said the crazy-haired, bleary-eyed, clearly high-as-a-kite cashier. He wore a Kelly green tee shirt that proclaimed _Kiss me, I’m Myrish._ Printed in smaller lettering below the main message were the words, _Ask me about my flaming sword!_

“I’ve got her covered. The food coloring too,” said Sandor, pulling out his wallet over Sansa’s red faced protests. “Two cases of Harps, too,” he added, jerking his head toward the stacked boxes behind the counter.

“Don’t they have any more Guinness?” Sansa whispered to Sandor, edging further away from the water that Edd was slopping around on the floor. 

“If you insist on making green beer, you should use something lighter than a stout,” Sandor muttered, swiping his credit card through the reader. _Not that anybody_ should _make green beer_ , his eyes seemed to imply. “Here, hold this.” He handed Sansa the single bottle of red wine that he had clearly intended as his only purchase for the evening before Sansa had showed up and made a literal and figurative mess of everything.

Moments later Sansa stood on the sidewalk beyond the store’s automatic sliding doors, carrying a plastic bag into which the clerk had tucked the food coloring and the bottle of wine, with Sandor standing beside her and casually holding the boxes as if they were a filled with feathers instead of 48 bottles of beer. The skin on her bare arms prickled in the cool spring night air, and she wished that she had more than a mint-colored tank top and a green marabou feather boa around her neck for warmth.

“What are you doing here?” Sansa asked, and immediately regretted it. It was quite clear what he was doing at the store. 

“What people usually do at liquor stores,” Sandor answered, obviously thinking that she was every inch the dullard that she felt. His eyes slid across her St. Patrick’s Day swag, and she couldn’t read what he thought of it all from his expression, but he couldn’t possibly think it looked weirder than the full-body wolf costume that she had been wearing when he kissed her. Could he? He shrugged his shoulders and the bottles clinked inside of the boxes. “Just picking up booze for the Baratheons.”

“Oh,” Sansa said, now feeling like an idiot who couldn’t even think of anything to say. Well, there was one thing. “You’re not wearing green,” she observed, passing her eyes across his plain black tee shirt and jeans, and she wondered whether anybody had had the guts to pinch him today.

Sandor looked her up and down, his eyes catching on the feathers. “You’re wearing enough for the both of us,” he murmured, and now that she wasn’t too busy thinking about dropping two whole cases of beer in front of him, she realized that he had more of an accent than Sansa remembered from before. His voice had too many “r” trills to be straight-up British, and it didn’t have the Irish lilt that Sansa remembered from the endless stream of punk rock singers that Arya had subjected her to in high school. But whatever it was, it was sexy. “So, where do you want these?” He asked.

“Um, can you help me carry them to my friends’ house? It’s just up the block,” Sansa added, relieved when he agreed. Perhaps he wasn’t completely disinterested after all, as she had feared.

Her hope was short-lived, however. They walked side by side without speaking, the laughter and party music blaring from the apartments up and down the street only serving to emphasize the silence between them. Why were things so awkward between them now? Sandor’s kisses had been so sweet and unvarnished on Halloween, right up until the moment that Joffrey had stumbled out of the front door and puked all over Sansa’s parents’ front porch and demanded in his high-pitched slur that Sandor drive him home.

As they stood together at a crosswalk waiting for the light to change, Sandor turned to her. “You know they don’t really do all this crap over in Ireland, don’t you?”

Sansa knew. Her mother, who was rigidly religious even by old school Catholic standards, spent every seventeenth of March reminding the whole Stark family that St. Patrick’s Day was intended for religious reflection, and given that the day landed smack-dab in the middle of Lent, it was most certainly _not_ a time for consumer-driven debauchery. 

“From what I understand, the Irish quite enjoy their snake-free existence,” she replied with a bit more sauciness than she might otherwise have interjected into her voice but for the fact that she was growing increasingly embarrassed at Sandor’s apparent lack of interest in the kiss they had shared.

Sandor grunted in what might possibly have passed for an expression of amusement, and Sansa was sure that she saw a flash of teeth under the streetlamp. “Still don’t know what that has to do with all that stuff hanging off you.”

Maybe not all was lost. Encouraged by his teasing, if that was what it was, Sansa smiled. “Well, here in _America,_ we appropriate everyone else’s cultural traditions and bastardize them into an opportunity to drink ‘til we puke and wear disposable plastic junk made in China.” Which reminded her, Cinco de Mayo was coming up.

Sandor grunted again, and this time Sansa was sure that he was laughing.

They turned onto a street that was almost entirely lined with cheap two-story grad student housing units. Soon they were standing at the foot of the iron and concrete stairwell leading up to Ygritte and Alayaya’s apartment. The beat from “I’m Shipping Up to Boston” thudded out from the open window, and the strong stench of cheap weed wafted down from above. “Here we are,” Sansa said, swinging the plastic bag back and forth. “Just leave the beer on the steps. One of my friends can bring it up.” She gave Sandor a small smile. “Thank you for your help.”

“Yeah.” Sandor set the two cases of beer down on the steps. He swayed a bit on the balls of his feet, and his arms hung down like he didn’t know what to do with them.

“Why didn’t you --”

“I didn’t know --”

They both stopped at the same time. “You first,” Sandor mumbled.

“Why didn’t you come back to the costume shop to find me after Halloween?” Sansa asked. She hoped it didn’t sound as whiny and desperate to him as it did to her own ears.

A look of genuine surprise passed across Sandor’s face. “I wasn’t sure --” he stopped, closed his mouth, started again. “Costumes make people do funny things,” he said. “Makes them act in ways they wouldn’t normally.”

“Except Joffrey, maybe,” Sansa joked, and Sandor smirked and nodded in agreement, but he did not say anything more.

Sansa shivered and crossed her arms over her chest and looked down at her pink Converses. She had almost borrowed Arya’s green Doc Martens, but the boots were just so not her style, and besides, they pinched her toes. Even without the matching shoes, though, she was kind of in a costume right now, what with all the bright green trinkets. Maybe Sandor wouldn’t take her interest seriously right now either.

There was only way to find out. “Do you want to come up to the party with me?” She asked, hope threading through her voice.

“No,” Sandor spat, the word like a shot of whiskey dropped into a pint. 

Well, he couldn’t have possibly been more clear than that. Apparently their kiss hadn’t meant the same thing to him that it had to her. “Um, alright then.” Sansa heaved a heavy, embarrassed sigh and turned away, stepping onto the stairs. 

But then Sandor placed his big hand on her shoulder and said, “Well, yeah, I do, but I can’t.” He traced his fingers down Sansa’s arm and gave her bracelet-encrusted wrist a squeeze before taking the plastic bag from her hand. “I have to deliver this to Joffrey’s mother,” he grumbled, rolling his eyes. “Then I’ll probably have to go scrape Joffrey off the floor of some shit British-themed pub because no one in this country full of idiots knows that Ireland is a whole separate nation, and don’t even get me started on what they think about Scotland, and asking what I wear under my _kilt,_ for fuck’s sake, and --” he carried on for a bit about United Kingdom political boundaries and culture that Sansa didn’t quite follow, then dropped his chin to his chest. “Anyway, I can’t stay.”

“I see,” Sansa said, bouncing on her tiptoes. She wasn’t sure what she was supposed to do from here. Bat her eyelashes flirtatiously to emphasize her frosty green eyeshadow? Offer her phone number and ask him to call? 

“That stuff looks really crazy,” he commented, gesturing to vaguely to her outfit.

Sansa pressed her lips together and exhaled through her nostrils in frustration. Would he give her no clear signal one way or the other?

“But you’re probably the only one who could make it look so good,” he said as he set the plastic bag on the ground. “Really good,” he rasped, his eyes tracing the curve of her waist.

 _Finally,_ was all she could think as he reached for her and wrapped his arms clear around her back. As his tongue slid past her teeth, Sansa vaguely noticed that he still had a few inches of height on her even while she stood on the first step. She embraced him in return and closed her eyes and leaned into the kiss she had been imagining for months, and rather than protest when Sandor slid his hand down her back and into the pocket of her jeans, she bit down on his bottom lip hard. He hissed in approval and practically yanked her bodily off the step and pushed her up against the exterior apartment wall. The cold stucco ground into her shoulder blades and she couldn’t help but chuckle into his mouth.

“What’s so funny,” he grumbled, nipping his way down her throat.

Sansa laughed outright at the grumpy look on Sandor’s face as he came up for air. “This is, uh --” she swallowed and caught her breath. There was a tiny piece of green feather snagged in his beard. “Different than last time.”

“Damn right it is,” he hissed, and he squeezed her ass through her jeans. “This time, I’m getting your number before I leave.”

*_*_*_*_*_*

[Happy (early) St. Patrick’s Day!]

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to swimmingfox for a little help on the dialogue. Oh, and of course her Scottish Sandor in her story Rebound = THE BEST. I mean, besides Rory McCann.
> 
> One more part coming up in a few weeks :)


End file.
